An almost stunned disbelief has greeted the findings of an investigatory panel that a superstar scientist at Bell Labs has been found guilty of serious scientific misconduct and dismissed. When charges surfaced earlier this year that work published by Jan Hendrik Schon might be seriously flawed, researchers generally hoped and perhaps even expected that defects would prove minor or incidental and attributable to mere carelessness or overzealousness.
Because of the gravity of the Schon case, and its implications for research with potentially big long-term commercial payoffs, IEEE Spectrum is looking at it from several angles. An analysis of the investigatory report, by Alexander Hellemans, finds that it stopped just short of declaring Schon's work bogus. The five-member panel found serious defects in 24 of his papers, manifesting three kinds of implausibility: duplication of data supposedly representing different physical realities, unrealistic precision in the reporting of some information, and inconsistency with known physical principles. Most seriously of all, Schon was unable to provide the committee with electronic data sets or laboratory notebooks detailing his experimental findings.
A companion piece describes how journals that published much of Schon's work are handling the delicate process of retracting it, and what is happening to Schon's patent filings. Herbert Kroemer, a member of the investigating panel and an IEEE Medal of Honor recipient, discusses the case's implications for the engineering and science communities in an interview (excerpted in the magazine and published in full on the Web site http://www.spectrum.ieee.org).
A related feature carried on Spectrum Online, Neil Savage's "Who's Responsible," discusses the ethical position of researchers who co-author papers. In the case of Schon, all his papers had coauthors, and his superior, Bertram Batlogg, signed 17 of the 24 disputed articles.
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